Our Town Could Be Yours

By MAGGIE JONES

Published: July 15, 2012

CORRECTION APPENDED

Around 10 on a clear May morning in 2008, two black helicopters circled over Postville, Iowa, a town of two square miles and fewer than 3,000 residents. Then a line of S.U.V.'s drove past Postville's main street and its worn brick storefronts. More than 10 white buses with darkened windows and the words ''Homeland Security'' on their sides were on their way to the other side of town. Postville's four-man police force had no forewarning of what was about to happen. Neither did the mayor.

The procession of S.U.V.'s, buses and state-trooper cars were descending on Agriprocessors, the largest producer of kosher meat in the United States and Postville's biggest employer, which occupies 60 acres on the edge of town. Several silos clustered together like old, overgrown tin cans behind the plant's chain-link fence. Low-slung, rusted metal buildings -- one with a 10-foot menorah mounted on its top -- contained hundreds of workers, chickens and cattle.

The early shift at Agri, as Postville residents call it, had been under way for several hours when dozens of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dressed in black flak vests, stormed the plant's buildings. Workers shouted, ''La migra, la migra'' (immigration police), dropped their butcher and boning knives and fled from their jobs at the cutting and grinding machines. A group of women ran to a bathroom and locked themselves in the stalls before I.C.E. agents forced them out. A couple of men scaled Agri's fence and hid in the cornfield across the street, where they remained until the next morning. Others climbed onto the roof near the smokestack of the chicken-processing building. From there, one man called a friend from his cellphone: ''Take care of my children,'' he pleaded.

Fermin Loyes Lopez, a 27-year-old father from Guatemala who had been living in Postville for five years, found his wife, Rosa Zamora Santos, who worked the same shift, cutting chicken meat off breast bones. One of their daughters, a toddler, was with a baby sitter; the other, a 5-year-old, was in kindergarten. After a quick call to the baby sitter, Lopez counseled his wife: ''Tell them the truth,'' he said, referring to the I.C.E. agents, just before he was arrested. ''Tell them your real name. Tell them we have children.''

Meanwhile, several blocks away, on Lawler, the town's main street, Elver Herrera, a former plant worker who ran the local bakery, hid Latinos in an apartment above his store. The head of the local Catholic Church's Hispanic ministry raced to a nearby apartment complex where many Latino families lived and handed out printed information about undocumented immigrants' rights, while a school counselor went door to door, telling families to stay away from the plant.

Within hours of the raid -- which I.C.E. had planned for months, based on evidence that large numbers of Agri's employees used suspect or false Social Security numbers and that plant managers hired minors and violated other labor laws -- I.C.E. agents detained 389 undocumented workers, most of them Guatemalan. (Agri employed more than 900 workers, over three shifts.) The agents handcuffed the wrists of the men and women and loaded them into the Homeland Security buses. With one state-trooper vehicle in front of each bus and another behind, they drove 75 miles to Waterloo, Iowa. There, I.C.E. had transformed an 80-acre fairgrounds, the National Cattle Congress, into a temporary processing center for the workers. Many of the detainees, including Lopez, were then sent to prisons throughout the country, where they would spend five months before being deported to Guatemala.

Back in Postville, about 400 residents poured into St. Bridget's Catholic Church, which would become the town's de facto relief center in the months to come. Women, men and children ate at the church and slept in the pews, afraid I.C.E. might be waiting for them at home.

On almost any other May evening, Guatemalan families, many of whom had lived in Postville for years and were a tight-knit group from two villages in Guatemala, would have been outside, pushing strollers down Lawler Street, stopping for tacos at the Mexican restaurant, Sabor Latino, and for ice cream at the Sweet Spot. Instead, downtown was empty. At the Tidy Wave laundromat, washers and dryers were filled with clothes. No one ever came to claim them.

Some families packed their cars in the middle of the night and drove to other meatpacking towns in Iowa or to another part of the United States altogether. Others turned to a van service, run by a local Guatemalan-American, that would eventually shuttle more than 100 people to O'Hare Airport in Chicago for one-way flights to Guatemala City. Children stopped going to school. Within weeks, roughly 1,000 Mexican and Guatemalan residents -- about a third of the town -- vanished. It was as if a natural disaster had swept through, leaving no physical evidence of destruction, just silence behind it.

Postville -- a town with no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants and a weekly newspaper that for years featured the ''Yard of the Week'' -- had been through one of biggest single-site immigration raids in U.S. history. For 20 years, this community of schoolteachers, town officials, farmers and others had lived diversity up close, through influxes of Orthodox Jews, Guatemalans and Mexicans, in ways many people in large cities never do. The raid might have pushed that diversity out of Postville. Instead, the post-raid, post-Latino years would create a more complex community and more big-city challenges for tiny Postville than anyone could have envisioned.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article on July 15 about Postville, Iowa, misspelled the last word in the name of a restaurant. It is Restaurante Rinconcito Guatemalteco, not Guatemaltecoa.